Samsung is kind of a big deal. In addition to manufacturing everything from tablets to televisions to turbines, the Korean giant is one of the world’s largest producers of DRAM and NAND flash memory, and it has long provided SSDs to OEMs and systems integrators. Samsung entered the retail SSD market in late 2010, with its 470 Series SSD delivering performance on par with the first-gen SandForce drives that owned the top end of the market. It’s now late 2011, and the goalposts have shifted. Samsung’s Series 830 drive boasts a slimmer look, a refreshed controller, and a 6Gb/s SATA interface. Can the new part compete with today’s top SSDs? Like the Series 470 SSD, the Series 830 is top-to-bottom Samsung, from the 20nm toggle NAND, to the 256MB of DDR2 cache, to the tri-core ARM processor controlling the drive. Samsung tells us the three-core design allowed them to dedicate one core to full-time garbage collection. The controller is similar to the one on the Series 470, but the Series 830 brings much-needed 6Gb/s SATA support.